Create ribbon charts in Power BI

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Note

These visuals can be created and viewed in both Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service. The steps and illustrations in this article are from Power BI Desktop.

You can create ribbon charts to visualize data, and quickly discover which data category has the highest rank (largest value). Ribbon charts are effective at showing rank change, with the highest range (value) always displayed on top for each time period.

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Create a ribbon chart

To create a ribbon chart, select Ribbon chart from the Visualizations panel.

Ribbon charts connect a category of data over the visualized time continuum using ribbons, enabling you to see how a given category ranks throughout the span of the chart's x-axis (usually the timeline).

Since the dataset contains data for only one year, we removed the Year and Quarter field from the Axis well.

The ribbon chart shows rank for every month. Notice how rank changes across time. For example, the Home category moves from second to fifth from February to March.

Format a ribbon chart

When you create a ribbon chart, you have formatting options available in the Format section of the Visualizations pane. The formatting options for ribbon charts are similar to those for a stacked column chart, with additional formatting options that are specific to the ribbons.

These formatting options for ribbon charts let you make adjustments.

Spacing lets you adjust how much space appears between ribbons. The number is the percentage of the column's maximum height.

Match series color allows you to match the color of the ribbons with the series color. When set to off, ribbons are gray.

Transparency specifies how transparent the ribbons are, with the default set to 30.

Border lets you place a dark border on the top and bottom of the ribbons. By default, borders are off.

Since the ribbon chart does not have y-axis labels, you may want to add data labels. From the Formatting pane, select Data labels.

Set formatting options for your data labels. In this example, we've set the text color to white and display units to thousands.